The “Semantic Web” and “Web 3.0” are terms coined to describe efforts to provide and use tools, techniques, and technologies that allow computer-processable descriptive information to supplement or replace the content of documents in the global information space known as the World Wide Web (the “Web”). Web documents are often written in Hyper Text Markup Language (“HTML”), which permits items in a Web document to be classified in terms of document organization or visual layout, but does not generally allow for classification of a particular item based on a semantic description of the content of the item. Examples of tools, techniques, and technologies useful in conjunction with the Semantic Web/Web 3.0 include Resource Description Framework (“RDF”) and RDF schemas, Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) and XML schemas, and Web Ontology Language (“OWL”).
In addition to Web documents, there are many other types of resources on the Web. Digital media objects such as video files, audio files, image files, graphics files, multimedia files and playlist files are examples of resources that are not part of Web documents. Efforts associated with the Semantic Web/Web 3.0 do not always address organization and accessibility of non-Web document resources.
Online digital media sharing services, which are hosted by network-side Web sites that encourage users to upload digital media objects to the Web, have enjoyed tremendous growth in recent years partly because of the ever-increasing amount of personal digital media content created by people using a wide variety of personal digital media sources. Examples of personal digital media sources are personal media rendering devices, personal computers, phones, digital cameras, and personal digital assistants. In seeking to exchange digital media objects with others, people desire both to share their own digital media objects and to discover the digital media objects of others that may be of interest to them.
Because each resource on the Web can be referenced—and often accessed or linked to via the Internet—using a Uniform Resource Identifier (“URI”) address, theoretically each individual digital media object on the Web is locatable via its unique URI. As a practical matter, however, personal digital media objects are serendipitously named by their creators, making the discovery of a particular digital media object having digital content related to a particular subject matter difficult without either knowledge obtained from the creator or registration with an established digital media sharing service that provides some organizational framework for uploaded digital content.